WD, Seagate Recover From HDD Shipment Shortage
Both Seagate and Western Digital have improved their HDD shipments following the disastrous Thailand flood last year.
Seagate's CEO Steven Luczo said that more drives are shipping, but the low-point of supply was not in November as previously believed, but "closer to mid-December".
Seagate shipped 61 million drives in the first quarter (13 percent of which were Samsung drives), up from about 47 million units in Q4 of 2011. Western Digital said it shipped about 44 million drives, up from 28.5 million units in the prior quarter. Seagate's revenue climbed to $4.4 billion, the net income was $1.1 billion WD's revenue was $3.0 billion and net income $483 million. Both companies also recently gained in market capitalization again. Seagate currently stands at about $13.11 billion, while WD is at $9.74 billion.
Luczo told analysts that the HDD industry will continue its current pace of recovery. In Q4 2011, a total of 119 million drives were shipped, while Q1 saw estimated total shipments of about 140 million units. The total available market (TAM) for Q2 will be 160 million drives, 180 million for Q3 and up to 190 million for Q4, according to Seagate. However, Luczo did not say how many drives Seagate will be able to ship in those quarters. The executive noted that "distribution pricing [of hard drives] remains well above historical spreads" and there remains a "a substantial and growing shortfall in unmet exabyte demand resulting from the supply-chain disruptions caused by the floods."
WD's John Coyne was a bit more optimistic and told analysts that "the recovery activities related to both WD operations and those of [its] supply chain partners impacted by the Thailand floods have reached the point where [the company] now [has] the capability to adequately meet anticipated customer demand in the current quarter and beyond."
Prices are already falling ~$10-20/month on 2TB drives, it will not be long now before we start seeing prices where we are use to seeing them again.
LMAO ok hot shot then who is the better HDD brand sense apparently you have such bad luck with Seagate and WD unlike the rest of us
Prices are already falling ~$10-20/month on 2TB drives, it will not be long now before we start seeing prices where we are use to seeing them again.
I'll also give it another month to let the prices drop before I ditch my 40GB drives for a terabyte. I "tera-bly" need it!
I haven't even considered an HDD purchase since I started hearing about this in the news.
Does everyone realize Thailand floods every year? Not like this every year, but there's definitely risk every year. It's like putting your business on the banks of New Orleans. Is that a risk you'd be willing to take? The insurance companies won't?
Definitely seems like a last hurrah for the HDD market. They could charge all the OEMs dependent on them quite a few more bucks as consumers backed off directly purchasing the drives. In the meantime, SSDs become more numerous, the production price becomes lower, and in turn the cost to the consumer decreases. Neither Seagate or WD has become a major player in the SSD space. WD made a half-arsed effort early on with prices well beyond the competition, but you don't see their SSDs for sale anywhere these days.
It's unfortunate because I really trust my WD mechanical drives. I would think they could bring that same quality to the SSD market. Intel has been doing a good job of fulfilling my storage needs since the price of the HDDs skyrocketed. Not as much space as an HDD, but definitely superior performance.
if all goes well with the design ASUS came up with, we won't need big clunky noisy drives of any kind any more. i see this bluray bit as a last ditch money sucking scheme by the MPAA and RIAA to keep pushing obsolete technology like cpu/gpu makers with all the various modes and slight speed increases and socket changes.
memory card readers have been around since the early 2000's and yet they are still using discs, .wav and mp3's were the wake up call. youtube is another. we already know who won the battle of disc vs. file media.
720p=96
1080p=128
i haven't d/l or made any file less then 256 since encoders came out, i certainly don't use movies that are less then 1200p with only 8-track 1970's options.
if all goes well with the design ASUS came up with, we won't need big clunky noisy drives of any kind any more. i see this bluray bit as a last ditch money sucking scheme by the MPAA and RIAA to keep pushing obsolete technology like cpu/gpu makers with all the various modes and slight speed increases and socket changes.
memory card readers have been around since the early 2000's and yet they are still using discs, .wav and mp3's were the wake up call. youtube is another. we already know who won the battle of disc vs. file media.
720p=96
1080p=128
i haven't d/l or made any file less then 256 since encoders came out, i certainly don't use movies that are less then 1200p with only 8-track 1970's options.
so what? they are still pricier and right now consumers are still stuck with SSD's with a max of 120-200GB. you can make SSD's cheaper than magnetic drives but they are still nothing but a windows partition
well there goes a 3rd choice for hard drives
I own both. I have been through the warranty process of both. I seem to see equal product failures between them. Seagate wants log files from SEATOOLs. They also want users to make use of the spare sector feature in seatools to "fix" hard drives that are going bad before sending them in.
WD, on the other hand, will accept a WDDIAGS error result code in their website (consumer grade, RE edition, etc) and let you choose to do an advanced replacement (give them your CC and they will send you a replacement drive first).
I have used the WD advanced replacement program several times form myself and for corporate use. It has always worked. Since the drives are mechanical, and all drives will eventually fail, guaranteed, I want one with a user-friendly warranty service.
Just my practical approach. It works for me.
I'm pretty sure that they hit a little lower than that just 3 days before this whole fiasco.
Yes, I still call it a fiasco, because that's what this whole thing has been.
If it wasn't then how did they instantly triple the price on the drives?
Drives that were already on US soil, drives that never got wet?
Now 2TB are just too small for my needs, I will wait a bit longer until at least 4TB are around $100.... or lower. (my real target are 5TB, which we should had already, but with all this fiasco I guess is going to get a bit longer to get them.)
Pity... Seems to be very much alike CPU and GPU situation at this moment. The prices remains the same...
This year i have bought 30 seagate drives that have gone out in systems not one has come back yet,wd blacks do last longer but blue and green wd drives have really high failure rates.
Also half the laptops we sold had wd blue scorpio's and failed within 3 months wd really needs to look at those drives esp the greens are known to fail due to excessive head parking.
The price should be dropping faster there is no shortage, i can order as many as i want from my supplier so what is taking them so long to put drives back to normal prices i smell collusion here won't be surprised to find wd and seagate working on a price fixing scheme.
i had 6 hdd failures with seagate 1.5tb drives, and i had the easy warranty replace without any kind of code needing to give them. this was about a year ago now, but their return is excellent at least in my experience, and the person i talked to sounded like they were in america.
im waiting on a 4tb hitting 200